About the same time in July 2007, as the US defense and aerospace major Lockheed Martin announced the opening of its centre for innovation, under a joint venture with an Indian company, the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector meekly disclosed that 77 % of Indians ?about 836 million people ? continue to live on less than half a dollar a day, making India home to one of the poorest and most vulnerable mass of human beings in the world. The world?s knowledge economy is also host to the world?s largest number of illiterates, estimated to be over 270 million.

Arundhati Roy, the celebrated Indian author and activist, likens the country?s progress over the last two decades, to two convoys of trucks : a small group that is on its way to a ?glittering destination near the top of world?, and a more massive pack that ?melts into the darkness and disappears?. ?A section of India has seceded from the nation?, she says.

That the country continues to progress under such stark disparity makes the Indian post-independence story particularly fascinating. A lesser nation with the religious, ethnic, economic and social fabric that India inherited from the colonial British would have self-destructed ? a prognosis that many western analysts liberally advanced on India?s future at Independence sixty years ago. The fact that India has existed successfully as a vibrant, liberal democratic nation despite its innumerable divisions with no major threat to its nationhood is admirable yet sometime inscrutable.

Equally enigmatic is its rise from the economic doom of the eighties. India?s economy made little progress for three decades, shackled under Nehru?s socialist policies. It began to grow at 6 % a year from 1980 to 2002 and at 7.5 % a year from 2002 to 2006. The credit for this acceleration goes partly to the acute economic crisis of the late eighties, which forced India to adopt a new set of pro market policies and partly to the emergence of a reformist Finance Minister and the present Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. India?s GDP recently passed the US$1 Trillion mark and so did the market capitalization at the upbeat Bombay Stock Exchange. Foreign direct investment tripled in the fiscal year 2007 to about $16 billion from just $5.5 billion a year earlier.

The notable thing about India?s rise is not that it is new, but that its path has been unique, observes Gurcharan Das, an Indian columnist, businessman and author of the best seller ?India Unbound?. He elaborates ?rather than adopting the classic Asian strategy ? exporting labor-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West-India has relied on its domestic market more than exports, consumption more than investment, services more than industry, and high-tech more than low-skilled manufacturing. The consumption-driven model is also more people-friendly than other development strategies?.

?Inequality?, as a result, he comments, ?has increased much less in India than in other developing nations. (Its Gini index, a measure of income inequality on a scale of zero to 100, is 33, compared to 41 for the United States, 45 for China, and 59 for Brazil.) Moreover, 30 to 40 % of GDP growth is due to rising productivity ñ a true sign of an economy?s health and progress ñ rather than to increases in the amount of capital or labor?.

Most remarkable, he finds, is the fact that rather than rising with the help of the state, India is, in many ways, rising despite the state. India now boasts highly competitive private companies, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector.

Public debt is high, which discourages investment in needed infrastructure. The public sector, although much smaller than China?s, is still too large and inefficient ? a major drag on growth and employment and a burden for consumers. And although India is successfully generating high-end, capital and knowledge-intensive manufacturing, it has failed to create a broad-based, labor-intensive industrial revolution ? meaning that gains in employment have not been commensurate with overall growth. Its rural population, meanwhile, suffers from the consequences of state-induced production and distribution distortions in agriculture that result in farmers? getting only 20 to 30 % of the retail price of fruits and vegetables (versus the 40 to 50 % farmers in the United States get), observes Das.

?A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.? Jawaharlal Nehru?s famous discourse at the dawn of India?s independence, was held in doubt by a generation of citizens whose fate remained unchanged in a country plagued by poverty and general deprivation. Two decades of progress has, however, renewed the generation?s hope in the nation which Winston Churchill, predicted ?will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages after the British left the subcontinent?.

India?s ?greatness?, concludes Das, ?lies in its self-reliant and resilient people?. They are able to pull themselves up and survive, even flourish, when the state fails to deliver. Time and again, Indian democracy has shown itself to be resilient and enduring ? giving a lie to the old prejudice that the 77 % poor are incapable of the kind of self-discipline and sobriety that make for effective self-government.

Still, the abysmal state of governance reminds Indians of how far they are from being a truly great nation. They will reach such greatness only when every Indian has a meaningful job, access to good education, a working health clinic, and clean drinking water.

The sixtieth year of Independence raises the most plausible hope for the first time in decades. A hope, for the 77 % of the Indians who had resigned themselves to the darkness of the post-independence India. A hope, that a rising tide would also lift their broken boat. A hope that Nehru?s Independence promise to the nation shall be met.

<B>Baljinder SHARMA</B>